Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan Page A

was a lot bigger than just Wilson, North
Carolina. I mean, there was a national movement going on about barbecue, something that
I literally took for granted. But I learned there how what I was doing fit into the
bigger picture, that barbecue was an African American contribution and I was part of
that tradition. So that was very exciting. It made me proud, very proud.”
    Southern Foodways wanted to tell the story
of barbecue as an important African American contribution to American culture. The only
problem was that most of the faces of Southern barbecue were now white, like the Joneses
in Ayden, even when a black pitman like James Howell might be working out back. Ed was
the exception: a black man who owned the pits he cooked on. (Or at least did then,
before his troubles.) So Ed Mitchell was as important to the Southern Foodways Alliance
as the Foodways Alliance was to Ed Mitchell.
    As part of the symposium, the pit masters
were invited to cook their specialty and then submit to judging by the food writers;
competitive cooking has become an important part of barbecue culture over the last few
years. Ed tells a story about how the truck carrying his rigs made a wrong turn at
Tupelo and arrived hours late. “Everybody else had these fancy rigs set up—you
know, with canopies and shining lacquer. Some of these guys had invested hundreds of
thousands of dollars! So everybody’s waiting to see what sort of equipment Ed
Mitchell’s got, but it hasn’t shown up. Then, finally, the truck pulls up,
this big eighteen-wheeler, and they’re expecting something fancy to come out of
the back when we open the doors. Well, I roll out myequipment—and
it’s just these three rusty old barrel cookers, that’s all! And everybody
just laughed.
    “But you see, that’s all
I’ve ever needed. So I cooked my pig—a little faster than I normally would,
because we started so late—and when it was done I pulled all the meat and chopped it up
and seasoned it. I put the skin back on the fire to crisp, and then chopped that into
real fine pieces and mixed it all together. And lo and behold, when people started
eating it, they started talking, and then literally everyone started running over to
taste my barbecue. We were bombarded! Everybody thought we’d just hung the moon.
We may have had the least impressive equipment, but it turned out the tastiest
product.
    “And then, from there on, old Ed
Mitchell’s story has been spiraling ever upward since.” Ed left the Oxford
symposium the most famous pit master in America.
     

     
    At the time, Ed was, like the Joneses,
cooking standard commodity hogs, but now he had entered a world where the provenance of
pork actually mattered. One of the food writers he met at the symposium was Peter
Kaminsky, who was researching a book about old breeds of pigs that would be published a
few years later under the title
Pig Perfect
. Kaminsky, who is from Brooklyn,
pointed out to Ed Mitchell, gently, that his barbecue was not quite as authentic as it
might be.
    “Peter Kaminksy told me
Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue had two out of the three big things people
were looking for in authentic barbecue: traditional cooking, a black-owned
establishment, and traditional hogs.” Kaminsky helped arrange for Ed to cook an
older breed of hog that had been raised outdoors. “I tell you, I was hooked fromthe first bite. This was the taste I remember from my childhood,
sweet and succulent and very, very good even without seasoning.”
    Kaminsky introduced Mitchell to some people
at North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, who were organizing a group
of black farmers, many of them former tobacco growers. The idea was to bring back some
of the older breeds of pigs, rearing them humanely on pasture without hormones or
antibiotics. An eye-opening visit to a hog-confinement operation solidified
Mitchell’s commitment to supporting this new/old kind of hog farming in North
Carolina. So did a comparative